Related papers: Early pathogen replacement in a model of Influenza…
Between pandemics, the influenza virus exhibits periods of incremental evolution via a process known as antigenic drift. This process gives rise to a sequence of strains of the pathogen that are continuously replaced by newer strains,…
Epidemiological models for the spread of pathogens in a population are usually only able to describe a single pathogen. This makes their application unrealistic in cases where multiple pathogens with similar symptoms are spreading…
The annual occurrence of many infectious diseases remains a constant burden to public health systems. The seasonal patterns in respiratory disease incidence observed in temperate regions have been attributed to the impact of environmental…
Common respiratory viruses cause seasonal epidemics in sequential patterns. The underlying mechanisms for this pattern have been debated for some time. For influenza, contenders include temperature, humidity, and vitamin D levels. While…
Under the hypothesis that both influenza and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) are the two leading causes of acute respiratory infections (ARI), in this paper we have used a standard two-pathogen epidemic model as a regressor to explain, on…
Health-policy planning requires evidence on the burden that epidemics place on healthcare systems. Multiple, often dependent, datasets provide a noisy and fragmented signal from the unobserved epidemic process including transmission and…
The impact of climate conditions on influenza epidemiology has mostly been studied by addressing a singular aspect of transmission and a climate variable correlating to it. As climate change unfolds at an unprecedented rate, we urgently…
Seasonal influenza presents an ongoing challenge to public health. The rapid evolution of the flu virus necessitates annual vaccination campaigns, but the decision to get vaccinated or not in a given year is largely voluntary, at least in…
Compartmental models have long served as important tools in mathematical epidemiology, with their usefulness highlighted by the recent COVID-19 pandemic. However, most of the classical models fail to account for certain features of this…
We introduce and discuss a minimal individual-based model for influenza dynamics. The model takes into account the effects of specific immunization against viral strains, but also infectivity randomness and the presence of a short-lived…
Global mobility flow data are at the heart of spatial epidemiological models used to predict infectious disease behavior but this wealth of data on human mobility has been largely neglected by reconstructions of pathogen evolutionary…
Many pathogens spread primarily via direct contact between infected and susceptible hosts. Thus, the patterns of contacts or contact network of a population fundamentally shapes the course of epidemics. While there is a robust and growing…
We propose a model of the immunity to a cyclical epidemic disease taking account not only of seasonal boosts during the infectious season, but also of residual immunity remaining from one season to the next. The focus is on the exponential…
Seasonal influenza epidemics cause consistent, considerable, widespread loss annually in terms of economic burden, morbidity, and mortality. With access to accurate and reliable forecasts of a current or upcoming influenza epidemic's…
We study how the interplay between the memory immune response and pathogen mutation affects epidemic dynamics in two related models. The first explicitly models pathogen mutation and individual memory immune responses, with contacted…
Epidemiological data on seasonal influenza show that the growth rate of the number of infected individuals can increase passing from one exponential growth rate to another one with a larger exponent. Such behavior is not described by…
Deterministic models are developed for the spatial spread of epidemic diseases in geographical settings. The models are focused on outbreaks that arise from a small number of infected hosts imported into sub-regions of the geographical…
The outbreak of mutant strains and vaccination behaviors have been the focus of recent epidemiological research, but most existing epidemic models failed to simultaneously capture viral mutation and consider the complexity and behavioral…
We consider a model for an influenza-like disease, in which, between seasons, the virus makes a random genetic drift $\delta$, (reducing immunity by the factor $\delta$) and obtains a new random transmissibility $\tau$ (closely related to…
Inspired by Minority Games, we constructed a novel individual-level game of adaptive decision-making based on the dilemma of deciding whether to participate in voluntary influenza vaccination programs. The proportion of the population…